Nikolova How Whiteness Claimed the Future

The Always New vs The Always Now in US-American Literature
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-3-11-089133-1
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 183 Seiten

Reihe: ISSN

Interested in the ideological workings of fiction, I study how major avant-garde tropes promote the potential of permanent renewal as white America’s property. Renewal ties to the capacities to create, progress, transcend, and simply be. From Black critique we know that, within dominant discourse, all these capacities have been denied to Black bodies ever since colonization. Black work has been fetishized, appropriated, stolen, and dismissed in and by dominant culture, while Black being is construed as negativity and barred on the level of ontology. It follows then that racialization operates on multiple levels in the conceptual frame of renewal. I study this conceptualization by re-reading the works of and criticism on progressive white authors. I examine how images of renewal enable the claim on futurity, transformative potential, and movement forward as exclusively white properties. Premised on oppositions between positive capacities and a state of complete incapacitation, these images are often viewed as separate constructions. This project shows that, deriving from white ideology, such representations are symbiotic and simultaneous - the "good" story of white renewal rests on the continual transgression towards Black being.

Zielgruppe

Scholars in the field of American Studies, avant-garde studies, C

Autoren/Hrsg.

Nikolova, Mariya

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Stoffe, Motive und Themen
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Englische Literatur Amerikanische Literatur

Über Autor(innen)

Mariya Nikolova, University of Potsdam, Germany